KC Unbound

Award-winning author Frank McCourt died in July 2009 at age 78. His memoir depicting a harsh childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, not only won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, but also the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Check out a few of Frank McCourt’s books at the Library or view some documentaries about his family and the feature film adaptation of Angela’s Ashes.

Books by Frank McCourt

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
By Frank McCourt
This luminous memoir by Frank McCourt depicts his childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy - exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling - does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.

Places of Grace: The Natural Landscapes of the American Midwest
Photographs by Gary Irving; essay by Michal Strutin
This collection of photographs uncovers the mystery and beauty of a part of the country that for most people is hidden in plain view. Places of Grace reveals both the physical splendor and the natural history of a ten-state region encompassing Illinois, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Open Places of Grace and be guided through forest, wetland, and prairie into the heart of the undiscovered Midwest. From the prairie grasses of western Nebraska to the boreal forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, this volume delights the eye and fires the imagination with unexpected images of lands that yet retain the marks of their primeval origins.

Celebrate Culinary Arts Month in July with these delicious novels – from drama to romance to mystery – which all feature chefs at work.

Eight people come together for cooking class at Chef Lillian’s restaurant each week in The School of Essential Ingredientsby Erica Bauermeister. Their stories are told in vignettes tied together by the pleasure of food in this “remarkable debut” (Publishers Weekly).

Kate Jacobs, the bestselling author of The Friday Night Knitting Club, takes on the world of celebrity chefs in Comfort Food. About to turn fifty, Chef Augusta’s TV show “Cooking with Gusto!” ratings are falling and Augusta is forced to make changes that include the much younger Carmen Vega. Augusta must deal with the changes and a possible love interest while suffering a mid-life crisis.

General

The New Solar System
Edited by J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Petersen, and Andrew Chaikin
A distinguished team of researchers, many of them Principal Investigators on NASA missions, explain the solar system. The book examines the latest research and thinking about the solar system; looks at how the Sun and planets formed; and discusses our search for other planetary systems and the search for life in the solar system. In full-color and heavily-illustrated, the book contains more than 500 photographs, portrayals, and diagrams.

Born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, Robert Heinlein wrote four Hugo Award-winning novels. The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s most prestigious award, are presented annually by the World Science Fiction Society. Pick one of these winners up for a summer read.

Heinlein’s best known and most influential novel, Stranger in a Strange Land published in 1961, tells the story of a human born and raised on Mars by Martians who returns to Earth as a young man with unique psychic abilities and a complete lack of knowledge about human customs and cultures.

Published in 1956, Double Star follows Lorenzo Smythe, an actor whose career is on the outs, who finds himself on Mars and takes on the role of impersonating a kidnapped politician. Smythe’s life and a potential interplanetary war are at stake.

An Artist in America
By Thomas Hart Benton
In this autobiography, Benton writes about his life and career. It includes descriptions of his boyhood in Missouri and his travels, as well as discussions of specific works of art and other artists.

Thomas Hart Benton (1989)
Filmmaker Ken Burns profiled Thomas Hart Benton in this PBS documentary. The film uses long-lost footage, interviews, and the art of Benton to tell the bittersweet story of this extraordinary American artist.

Nonfiction

Jesse James: The Best Writings on the Notorious Outlaw and His Gang
Edited by Harold Dellinger
From his early days as a Civil War guerilla to his untimely death at the hands of that "dirty little coward" Robert Ford, few figures in American folklore have captured the imagination quite like Jesse James. In these pages, noted James authority Harold Dellinger sifts through the hundreds of published articles and books about James to painstakingly create a compelling collage of character, an extraordinary, multifaceted portrait of one of history's most infamous outlaws.

Nonfiction

Gettysburg
By Stephen W. Sears
Gettysburg, the great Civil War campaign, was the turning point of the war. Sears tells the story in a single volume, from the first gleam in Lee's eye to the last Rebel hightailing it back across the Potomac.

Prism
By Faye and Aliza KellermanPrism takes us to a slightly alternate universe in which medicine and health care do not exist, and in which sick people are allowed to die without any care. Set in New Mexico and California, the novel features three teens that fall through a cave at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico while on a field trip. They are plunged into a frightening parallel universe – seven weeks in the past, in which their "normal" worlds of family and high school remain the same...except for the fact that no medicine exists and when people die in the street they are picked up and disposed of.

For National Rose Month this June, pick up some entertaining “rosy” reads at the Library.

Start with a fast-paced mystery. Publishers Weekly states that The Blue Rose by Anthony Eglin “combines just the right amount of horticultural detail with well-drawn characters and an absorbing plot.” In this book, Alex and Kate Sheppard move into a house in the Wiltshire countryside surrounded by a walled garden that contains an impossible, perfect blue rose bush. Death and kidnapping ensue.

Author Leann Sweeney began her Yellow Rose Mystery series with Pick Your Poison. In this novel, the young Texan heiress Abby Rose turns into an amateur sleuth after finding the gardener dead – a victim of murder – in her greenhouse.

Plenty: Eating Locally On the 100-Mile Diet
By Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnonPlenty tells the remarkable adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment--and learn the simple joys of reconnecting with community and home ground in the process.

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
By Gary Paul Nabhan
To rediscover what it might mean to "think globally, eat locally," Nabhan spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or caught within 200 miles of his home--with surprising results. In Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan draws these experiences together in a book that is a culmination of his life's work.

Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic and Here on Earth, will discuss her new book The Story Sisters on June 16, 2009 at the Plaza Branch. If you’re a fan of Hoffman’s work, you might enjoy these novels.

By Alice Hoffman

The Story Sisters
By Alice Hoffman
A family is shattered when one of three sisters dies tragically in an automobile accident. How the family survives--separates, reconfigures, and reconciles--is at the heart of this exquisite exploration of the ties that bind.

The Third Angel
By Alice Hoffman
Three mesmerizing tales of love and betrayal, inspiration and despair, survival and hope, brilliantly interact as characters merge from one fictional incarnation to the next.